At Energyhill we believe that SEO is the science and art of ranking higher on search engines for more organic traffic. SEO means search engine optimization. Over the past few decades SEO defined has taken a new form of relevancy for businesses, and organizations. During the SEO event on May 5th, 2017 we discussed the following topics:

History of SEO

Creating a Target Audience

Content Writing

Organize Content, and

Starting with a Website Audit

History of SEO Defined

As stated previously, SEO defined is simply organizing your content for your readers as well as for search engines to be able to crawl and index your content. However, has it always been this way? Here are some of the key milestones over the past 25+ years:

1990 – First “engine”

1994 – Collection of sites

1996 – Page rank

1998 – MS uses yahoo!

2000 – Rank monetized

2005 – Analytics

2008 – Things get scary

2009 – Microsoft bing

2009+ a 122 animals, a pirate, fred … and it continues.

Search Engines’ Mission

Google’s Mission has been and will always be to organize the world’s information. Likewise, most search engines have attempted to adapt Google’s approach. Over the last decade they really haven’t changed much. Google just keeps making small adjustments and tweaks to perfect their original goal. Since 2008 things have changed a little more quickly and differently due to mobile and tablet devices.

Recent Search Engine News

As recent as 2015 (April 22nd), search engine marketers, designers, developers, and many more were frantically trying to make certain their sites complied with Google’s #MobileMadness campaign. This campaign was an effort to help organizations go mobile-friendly. Even more recently (early part of 2017), Google killed intrusive popup banners. Don’t take our word for it though, here it is straight from Google:

January 10, 2017 update: Starting today, pages where content is not easily accessible to a user on the transition from the mobile search results may not rank as high. As we said, this new signal is just one of hundreds of signals that are used in ranking and the intent of the search query is still a very strong signal, so a page may still rank highly if it has great, relevant content.

This is actually good news for the mobile user … Majority. There is one thing we like less than pop-up banners… and that is mobile pop-up banners.

View below to watch the some of the session from the event:

Also if you are interested in starting your SEO plan and strategy, try an audit first.